Title
Characterization of Standard Cells for Intra-Cell Mismatch Variations
Abstract
With the adoption of statistical timing across industry, there is a need to characterize all gates/cells in a digital library for delay variation (referred to as statistical characterization). Statistical characterization needs to be performed efficiently with acceptable accuracy as a function of several process and environmental parameter variations. In this paper, we propose an approach to consider intra-cell process mismatch variations to characterize a cell's delay and output transition time (output slew) variations. A straightforward approach to address this problem is to model these mismatch variations by characterizing for each device fluctuation separately. However, the runtime complexity for such characterization becomes of the order of number of devices in the cell and the number of simulations required can easily become infeasible. We analyze the fluctuations in switching and nonswitching devices and their impact on delay variations. Using these properties of the devices, we propose a clustering approach to characterize for cell's delay variations due to intra-cell mismatch variations. The proposed approach results in as much as 12X runtime improvement with acceptable accuracy, compared with Monte Carlo simulation. We show that this approach ensures an upper bound on the results while keeping the number of simulations for each cell independent of the number of devices.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/TSM.2008.2011666
International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design
Keywords
Field
DocType
semiconductor device models,delay variation,intra-cell variations,output transition time,mismatch variation,standard cells,intra-cell process mismatch variation,semiconductor technology,mismatch variations,device fluctuation,statistical characterization,clustering approach,acceptable accuracy,straightforward approach,intracell mismatch variations,proposed approach result,cells (electric),intra-cell mismatch variations,cell's delay,output slew,fluctuations,statistical analysis,upper bound,electronics industry,industrial electronics,computational modeling,monte carlo simulation,sun
Statistical timing,Monte Carlo method,Statistical static timing analysis,Computer simulation,Upper and lower bounds,Computer science,Algorithm,Real-time computing,Electronic engineering,Transition time,Electronics,Cluster analysis
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
22
1
0894-6507
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.89
9
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Savithri Sundareswaran119016.84
J. Abraham24905608.16
A. Ardelea3201.73
R. Panda41002111.69